WordPress Development

Most WordPress sites are slow for the same reason: they were assembled, not built. A page builder to arrange things, a slider plugin, a mega-menu plugin, a form plugin, a “performance” plugin to undo the damage of the other four. The result works on the day it launches and gets worse every month after.

This service is the opposite approach. Your site gets a classic PHP theme, hand-written for your content. Templates are real files you can read. Styling is one CSS file plus a token sheet. Interaction is vanilla JavaScript, usually under 20KB. There is no jQuery, no build-step framework in the front end, and no plugin whose job is to move a heading eight pixels.

What that changes in practice

The obvious change is speed. A hand-coded theme starts at roughly a tenth of the front-end weight of a builder site, before any optimisation at all — so the performance work becomes a budget you hold, not a rescue you attempt. LCP under two seconds on a mobile connection is a design constraint here, not a stretch goal.

The less obvious change is maintenance. When the layout lives in template files instead of a database blob, a change is a code change: reviewable, reversible, and safe to make two years later. When it lives in a builder’s serialised markup, every change is archaeology.

The architecture

Two pieces ship, deliberately separated. The theme owns templates, CSS, markup and motion. A small companion plugin owns your content types, your custom fields, your SEO metadata and your structured data. That split is not academic: it means a future redesign — by me or by anyone else — cannot take your content with it. Deactivate the theme and every project, service and article is still exactly where it was.

The editor experience

A site nobody on your team can update is a site that dies quietly. Custom fields are laid out in plain language, in the order you would think about them. Where a field takes several values, it takes them one per line — no repeater UI to learn, no serialised array to migrate later. Where an image is needed, there is a media picker.

Accessibility and motion

WCAG 2.2 AA is part of the build, not an audit afterwards. Colour pairs are measured rather than eyeballed. Every interactive element has a visible focus ring. The keyboard path runs from skip link to navigation to form without a trap. Motion is transform and opacity only, and prefers-reduced-motion renders every section in its final state — immediately, not faster.

What it costs, and how long

Fixed price against a written scope, split into an upfront share and a balance at launch. A brochure site with five to eight templates typically runs three to five weeks; a larger publication or a store takes longer, and the scope document says so before you commit. Two rounds of revisions are included at the design stage, and thirty days of bug fixing after launch.

If you want to see the standard before you buy it, the work is all live or on a staging URL you can open — including this site, which is the same theme architecture described above.